The Big Switch

Australia's Electric Future

Saul Griffith

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781743822371
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Renewable Power Resources
• Index: Technology & Engineering

An optimistic – but realistic and feasible – action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything.
Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now – but what? Australian visionary Saul Griffith has a plan. In TheBigSwitch, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint – optimistic but feasible – for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future.
'I'm a scientist, engineer, inventor and father who wants to leave my kids a better world. The data convinces me that it is still rational to have hope.'—Saul Griffith

Chapter 1
The luckiest country

•With low population density and extraordinary renewable resources, Australia has the easiest path of any developed country to zero emissions.

•If we are confident and act aggressively, Australia can save money in the suburbs, create jobs in the regions, improve public health, improve environmental and water quality, grow our export economy and address historical inequalities, all while leading the world in addressing climate change.

Donald Horne penned his book The Lucky Country in 1964 to describe Australia. His phrase is still commonly used today to capture the good life and relative stability and comfort that many Australians enjoy. But the book was actually a critique; the final chapter began:

Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.

Written at the same time as Horne’s critical tome was ‘Restoring the Quality of our Environment’, the 1965 report of the environmental pollution panel of the US president’s Science Advisory Committee. It also began critically:

Ours is a nation of affluence. But the technology that has permitted our affluence spews out vast quantities of wastes and spent products that pollute our air, poison our waters, and even impair our ability to feed ourselves.

Within the report was another report of a subpanel of the committee on ‘Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide’, which accurately presented the climate challenge we now face. More than half a century has passed since then, and no country has made particularly good progress in dealing with it.

In spite of all that, I remain optimistic, and this book makes the case that we are not just a lucky country, but the luckiest. If we allow our first-rate people to lead, if we believe in our own ideas and ignore false gods sold to us from afar, if our ordinary people continue to be adaptable, it is Australia that can lead the world on climate change. And in taking that leadership role, we will reap the largest rewards not just for ordinary citizens and their energy bills, but by growing and diversifying our export economy with higher value-added metals and items produced using our abundant renewable energy. This will be an export economy that restores our environment and soils, rather than degrading them.

We have everything to win. We also have everything to lose.

What we have to lose is not the nonsense about jobs and industries and lifestyles and weekends and trucks and barbecues – that is the cynical banter of culture war political candidates who want you to believe we’ll lose jobs in solving climate change. We won’t, we’ll create more jobs, and everywhere, including in the communities that currently operate our fossil-fuel industries. What we actually have to lose is our spectacular and fragile ecosystems on this spectacular and fragile continent. The ecosystems that give us life and nourishment. So I’m going to place our spectacular and fragile ecosystems in the what-we-have-to-win column, because we either keep them, and we win, or we lose them.

Win, win, win!

If we go hard and go early on cutting emissions – and if by so doing we encourage other countries to increase their ambition and follow us – we have everything to win. We’ll be winning so much, we’ll win, win, win, win, win.

The first thing we will win is lower energy prices for all Australians. Driving our vehicles will be cheaper than it has ever been. Heating our homes and our showers will be cheaper than ever. Our electricity will be cheaper, too. The average household will probably save $5000 a year or more on energy and car expenses. There are two reasons for all this winning. One is the rooftop solar miracle. Through good policy and training programs, Australian rooftop solar is the cheapest electricity delivered to residential consumers in the world. This cheap solar energy will power more efficient electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps and induction cooking, which is where the savings come from. It’s a simple recipe.

In winning that first thing, savings in our suburbs, we’ll win a second thing: lots of local jobs. Manufacturing, installing and maintaining all the machines that will achieve win number one will require a huge number of tradies redeveloping our national suburban and commercial infrastructure, namely our homes (or castles) and our small businesses. These are the jobs installing rooftop solar, heat pumps, batteries, new appliances in our kitchens, and vehicle chargers; and the jobs insulating and upgrading our homes and businesses. You can’t offshore installation jobs because you can’t do maintenance on an EV or a heat pump from India, Europe or China.

Win number three will be creating enormously profitable export industries around the things that Australia already does well. Around a third of the cost of making steel or aluminium is the energy required to make it. If you have the cheapest energy in the world you can make the metals that the world needs at the lowest price. Australia has low population density and best-in-the-world solar and wind. We can and will be dominant in cleanly making the things the world needs to get through this energy transition – steel for wind turbines and electric vehicles, aluminium for transmission lines and lightweight structures, copper for all the wiring, lithium and cobalt for the batteries, silicon for the solar cells, uranium for nuclear power. The list is in fact much longer, but you get the point. We win on exports and the jobs they will create in the regions.

Win number four is a win for our health. Unless you have a coal plant in your community (I’m sorry about that), it is the burning of fuel in vehicles, lawnmowers and other engines that has the worst impact on your local air quality (along with the bushfires that they exacerbate by causing climate change). Burning methane and closely related hydrocarbons in our homes (gas-flame stovetops) is a leading cause of respiratory illness. It is just a successful and deliberate PR campaign that has you calling this toxic flammable gas ‘natural’. Many of the things you do to improve your health also improve climate outcomes – eating less meat, walking more, cycling more. Everything we do to mitigate climate change will improve our health and quality of life. Our air, water, suburbs, workplaces, schools, churches and libraries will all be cleaner. Even our oceans will be cleaner.

Win number five will be preserving our beautiful places. We might yet save some coral reefs, we’ll save many of our forests, we’ll regenerate our soils, we’ll improve the health of our waterways. The beautiful places we go for recreation should get more beautiful, not less. In learning to care for the whole Earth’s climate, we will also have the opportunity to redress our conflicts with the natural environment, to learn from First Nations peoples around the world, and especially the original caretakers of Australia, that we can live well and not in conflict with our land. This is in no way to suggest we need to abandon technological and other progress, but rather that we need to turn our extractive relationship with nature into a partnership with nature.

Win number six is in fixing inequalities. It should be simple enough to understand the statement that you cannot half-solve climate change. You can’t have half the people subscribing to, and affording, the solutions, while leaving the less wealthy half behind. In 2021 many people likely feel that they can’t afford the technological wonders that are at least a good part of the answer to climate change: electric cars, rooftop solar systems, a household battery, heat pumps. If we choose to actually address climate change we are de facto choosing to help everyone afford those solutions. We can empower households like never before, and in doing so we will need to make sure that households at all income levels can afford to be part of this transition and benefit from this new abundant Australia.

We need to paint more pictures in people’s minds of their decarbonised lives being bigger, brighter, better, healthier, wealthier, friendlier and more engaged. Here we go.

Calling bullshit

This book wants you to understand that we can get to a zero-emissions Australia with an ‘electrify everything’ approach, and that is how we will be best served in thinking about rapid and deep emissions cuts, and climate change.

But a lot of people will be bringing along other ideas, maybe ideas you heard your crazy aunt espouse at the Christmas table. Rather than let you read the ‘electrify everything’ argument in long form while you still believe some other strategy might work, I’m going to liberate you from some of the bad or impractical ideas now.

Carbon sequestration can’t do it

When you burn a hydrocarbon, it becomes three times bigger as a molecule, because you add two oxygen atoms to each carbon atom. It also becomes about 5000 times larger because it becomes a gas (CO₂), where in most cases it started as a liquid or a solid. The fossil-fuel industry is invested in the idea that you can keep burning their product, provided you capture that CO₂ and bury it. To capture the CO₂ requires expensive filtration equipment that, even if you exclude the cost of capital, requires a great deal of energy to operate.

So the idea amounts to using more energy to capture the CO₂, then yet more energy to compress the CO₂, then yet more energy again to transport that CO₂ to somewhere the geological formations allow you to hide it for hundreds or thousands of years while you hope it turns into a rock. Today we pull roughly 10 billion tonnes of fossil fuel out of the ground each year. It becomes 30 billion tonnes of CO₂. The fossil-fuel industry wants you to believe they can keep emitting a whole bunch more because we’ll be able to sequester it, but the world is already counting on a physically unrealistic amount of sequestering to compensate for ‘overshoot’ – the fact that we’ll go past our 1.5°C target and have to use negative emissions. In a nutshell, carbon sequestration can only make fossil fuels more expensive, which will make them even less competitive with cheaper renewables. We can’t do enough carbon sequestration to maintain even a fraction of the existing fossil-fuel industry. It is unlikely the world will be able to do enough carbon sequestration just to offset our overshoot, let alone to allow for continued offsetting of fossil fuels.

Electrification will be cheaper anyway, and will reduce the amount of energy we need by half while improving our quality of life.

Geoengineering can’t do it

Most geoengineering plans are in the world of solar radiation management. This is the idea that we block energy coming from the sun from warming up the planet. Once you go down this path, you have to maintain it in perpetuity. It’s a problem even worse than the legacy of nuclear waste disposal. If we do this geoengineering while still pumping CO₂ into the sky, then for some reason we stop the geoengineering because it gets too expensive or too hard, or politically problematic, then all of a sudden we’ll experience an extremely rapid spike in global heating because a huge pile of CO₂ will turn the temperature up very quickly. The ocean continues to acidify even if you are managing the solar radiation. We might need geoengineering for reasons unforeseen, so we shouldn’t stop researching it, but it is not yet a viable technology and we don’t have time to wait. We have the technology to electrify everything; we just need the ambition.

Hydrogen is a dumb way of doing it

Hydrogen is a battery, not an energy source. To make hydrogen with truly zero emissions it has to start with green electricity anyway, only it squanders more than half of that energy as waste in the energy conversion. In short, hydrogen is electrification, but a roundabout and very inefficient way of doing it. If we do hydrogen for the majority of the energy economy, it doubles or triples the amount of clean energy we have to produce. It is an expensive sideshow to the main event: electrification. Yes, a small amount of hydrogen, but let’s not get carried away. Beware! There are obvious reasons the gas industry likes to lobby for this idea. Because Australia has so much misplaced hope and hype around hydrogen, I’ll address this in detail in Chapter 4.

A focus on eliminating waste won’t do it

Plastic bags are bad when they wind up in waterways. Too many things are disposable. We throw away a ridiculous number of soft drink cans, take-out containers and coffee cups. These things are all true, and worthy of our attention, but recycling plastic and reusing shopping bags has a negligible effect on the warming climate. Nitrous oxide emissions from plastics production do have a climate effect, and we should look for alternatives, but this is not the main event. Yes, reduce, reuse, recycle, but most of all cleanly electrify and eliminate emissions. If we all use Keep-cups, stainless-steel water bottles and canvas tote bags, we won’t even come close to fixing climate change. We will hardly move the needle. In contrast, if we electrify everything, we’ll be most of the way there.

Veganism can’t get us there

Reducing meat and dairy consumption is one of the easiest personal choices people can make to reduce their climate impact, specifically cow products (beef and dairy) and sheep products. But alone it will not solve our climate problem, as agriculture makes up less than 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The largest proportion of emissions, by far, is our energy use, which is why we need to electrify and decarbonise how we use energy.

There are a number of problems with meat. One is the amount of land required to grow the feed. Another is that ruminants (cows, sheep) belch methane, which is far worse as a greenhouse gas than CO₂. On an infrastructure scale, better land management and new low-carbon farming alternatives will lower the impact of eating meat occasionally. We don’t have to give meat-eating up altogether, but it does need to become more conscious. Meat and dairy alternatives are growing wildly in popularity and quality, which will help to further reduce the impact of meat consumption on the climate.

Overpopulation is not the problem

Many people seem still to believe that the world population is just growing in an upward direction, won’t stop, and that this is a major problem for humanity. A recent survey of 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25 found that around four in every ten are hesitant to have children because of climate change. This misconception and population panic is definitely not limited to young people, and we should clear it up. Population experts predict the world population will level off at around 10–11 billion people.² To provide some context, we currently have around 7.9 billion people. From an energy perspective, enough sunlight hits Australia to supply the world’s current energy needs many times over, and that’s just one form of renewable energy. Where will all these people fit? The website ‘Wait But Why’ entertainingly explored some quick calculations for this, showing that 7.3 billion humans standing shoulder to shoulder could fit into a square about 27 kilometres on each side. That’s 729 square kilometres. The greater Sydney region is 12,368 square kilometres, and Tasmania is 68,401. So yes, the entire world population from every continent could stand shoulder to shoulder and fit into just one Sydney suburb. Obviously this is no way to live, but it illustrates just how much space there really is in the world. Of course there’s more to this story than just space and energy – but world population growth is not something to get incapacitated by. We know that the recipe for lowering population growth and improving quality of life invol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Why this book?
• 1 The luckiest country
• 2 Urgency and emissions
• 3 Energy
• 4 Australia’s energy options
• 5 Electrify (almost) everything!
• 6 Cheap and getting cheaper
• 7 Electrifying our castles
• 8 Crushed rocks – the export economy
• 9 Why politicians and regulations matter
• 10 Financing fossil freedom
• 11 So long, and don’t kill all the fish
• 12 An abundant Australia
• Appendix: Scales of energy use
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Back Cover